"I don't know how to make other people care..."

On lamentations (of powerlessness, of isolation, of overwhelm)

I was in Minneapolis this past Thursday, speaking to a group I love, the Southwest Alliance For Equity. The term “political home” gets thrown around a fair bit, but SWAE is one of the best around at actually embodying it. Their events are a rare combination of warm, catalytic and respectful of your time. They put people to work, but if you come to their meetings they’ll also give you a nice potluck dinner, a comfortable couch to sit on, and an introduction to a new neighbor you haven’t met yet.

As part of my speech, I facilitated a short group discussion. The prompt was deliberately basic. “When you think about this political moment, how do you feel?” All I asked of the crowd was that they answer honestly. When we shared our thoughts out loud, one comment in particular elicited a room full of nods and affirmations.

“I just get so frustrated by all the people who choose to stick their head in the sand and ignore what’s happening.”

I don’t know what particular rip-your-heart out headline was heaviest on the speaker’s heart. Perhaps they were thinking about starving children in Gaza or Sudan, or cheekily monikered concentration camps in Florida, or a climate crisis that reveals itself in a new way and a new location every week. I’ve personally heard that statement thousands of times, and said it myself plenty. Sometimes in response to mass death. Sometimes because human beings are sleeping on the streets. Sometimes because of the reality of who currently holds power in the United States, and what enabled his rise to power.

“How do I make them care?” is an all-purpose lament, a vessel large enough to contain a lifetime of external judgments and internal incriminations. Consider, for a second, everything that’s in the mix when we decry other people’s apathy. Self-righteousness (why aren’t you doing enough?) Self-flagellation (why aren’t I doing enough?). Selflessness (I care!). Selfishness (I need my caring to mean something; I need the pit in my stomach to disappear). It’s all such a fascinating mess, a Saturday night prize fight of busted hearts and raw sentiment.

I recognize that this is a cursed sentence, but have you been on Instagram lately? Don’t worry if not. I’m just making observations here, not recommendations. At least ostensibly, that platform offers a space to post videos and photos (its current marketing slogan: “capture and share the world’s moments”). But of course its truer purpose is as a depository of weighty signifiers. It is an emotional and energetic black site, where images of emaciated Gazan bodies and sans serif declarations of outrage exist side-by-side with breezy vacation photos. Quite often, all this and more lives on the same user’s feed. Each of them posted earnestly, I’m sure, but with an agenda. First a testament to the quality of one’s life, then to an ache in one’s heart.

I AM ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATED/AND ALSO I AM IN ITALY, we shout at each other in an infinite loop. I’M THRIVING, THANKS FOR ASKING/BUT ALSO HOW THE HELL CAN YOU ALL BE SO HEARTLESS?

On the days when we are posting about our devastation, we silently judge those reporting from beaches and birthday parties. On the days that we focus on frivolity, we hope that somebody we love remarks “so glad you’re having a good time!” and leaves it at that.

Are we being performative? Of course we are. At all times. We are performative because we are aware that we are being perceived. And perception, in turn, is a form of connection, though that’s easy to forget. What is the difference between performance and earnest action? We seem to know when it’s time to lob the accusation against others, but it feels murkier when you’re the one on stage.

You may hear all that and declare that you alone are not implicated in the “we” here, that you are fully focused on the needs of others, that you have transcended id and fatigue in a way that the rest of us have not. I love you, but forgive me for not fully believing you. That’s not to say that we don’t navigate this moment with varying degrees of privilege, nor that we are all equally complicit in systems of power and domination. Some of us live in war zones and some of us acquire vacation days and frequent flyer miles. Some of us own stock portfolios that balloon as soon as the bombers take to the sky. Some of us are barely getting by. Some of us are fortunate in some ways and vulnerable in others. Our situations are not equivalent. But none of us have figured it out, this art of navigating our own complicated lives while also bearing witness to a world in pain. If we had, we would not be stuck here together.

We are all both sacred and calamitous, I fear. We are mucking our way through it. Together, but pretending to be apart.

You have likely heard the concept of “psychic numbing,” originally coined by Dr. Robert Litton and more recently popularized by Dr. Paul Slovic. It seeks to explain why, for instance, we feel more compassion when we are confronted by news of one child’s suffering than the deaths of a million children. In recent weeks, I’ve heard multiple people deploy the term as further evidence that we, as a species, are pretty much cooked. It was a common refrain during the peak early years of Covid as well. “I hate us. How can we be so apathetic in the face of such death and devastation?”

I worry that’s a grave misreading. I’m no expert on decision theory, but my understanding is that it isn’t about how we grow less empathetic as the scale of tragedy increases. Quite the opposite. We care so capaciously, in fact, that we are filled to bursting. We feel powerless, so our brain panics and goes into self-preservation mode. We hear about one child and believe, intuitively “even me, for all my flaws, could do something about this” We hear about a million children and there is a part of us that cares a million times over, but it is immediately overwhelmed by the exponential impossibility of it all. How the hell do we solve a world developed in pain? By voting? By donating? By waving our signs at yet another protest? By posting one more sternly worded infographic to our feed? We don’t know, so we act accordingly. Some of us turn off our brains. Others yell, our volume growing louder to drown out the demons of self-doubt. Others volley back a self-congratulatory array of cynical counter-points. Onward discursive soldiers, “well actuallying” to war.

It strikes me, given how little any of us have this figured out, that we may be asking the wrong question. I have so much sympathy for why so many of us cry out “I can’t make you care,” but doing so assumes a binary choice. There are those of us who care and those of us who don’t. I wonder, though, if the more honest exhortation is one that invites rather than accuses.

“Do you feel powerless right now? Because I do...”

That’s only half the invitation. But already, I’m sure that some of you are taking umbrage. You can point to people in your life (perhaps dozens) who truly seem content in their lack of caring. No doubt you have encountered your own personal Jubilee Video Rogues Gallery of self-styled villains. “Don’t tell me to invite the cruelest amongst us to give a damn,” you might say. “I’ve tried, and it’s no use.”

Fine, then. I don’t know the people in your corner of the world. I am sorry if many are willfully malevolent. Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I don’t have to win this argument, and fortunately we don’t have to start there, with the hardest nuts to crack.

Surely there’s somebody in your life who (perhaps like yourself, definitely like myself) is more likely to be guilty of crimes of omission than commission. Surely there’s somebody who could be doing more. They don’t need a lecture on how heartless they are. They deserve the second half of that invitation.

“…would you like to do something together to feel less powerless?”

“But what?” they will surely reply.

And honestly, the answer is anything that keeps you and them in forward motion together. That may sound unsatisfactory if you’re still lost in the lie of self-aggrandizement, if you believe that it is on you personally to end genocide, to stomp fascism, and to have your every action have a far more than an equal reaction. But it’s good news if you, like me, are a single human being with a bucket load of flaws and frailties and a busy schedule who has tried the whole savior act and found that it does little good for anybody.

Back in Minneapolis, after I asked that group of neighbors how they were doing, I told a story from a nearby place. Wisconsin, to be exact. It’s a story that, in an ideal world, deserves more room to breathe¹ but for now a summary will suffice. It’s about the mystery of how, in the 19th and early 20th Century, Wisconsin was awash in glorious experiments for the public good. The nation’s first kindergarten. Our country’s most consequential abolition movement (one that birthed the early Republican Party). The first drafts of the economic policies that would eventually become the New Deal. The Wisconsin Idea, a forward-looking vision for how public universities can make everybody’s lives better. A long string of phenomenally effective Sewer Socialist mayors in my adopted city of Milwaukee. It’s quite a list.

Too often, these developments are treated as pleasant historic anomalies. “Wisconsin used to be quite the progressive hotbed,” us contemporary Sconnie lefties bemoan. “Too bad we became the state of Joe McCarthy and Scott Walker instead.” We scratch our heads at this inexplicable switcheroo, pretending as if political heroes and villains just flit in and out of our consciousness magically.

It’s not actually a mystery, though. Wisconsin’s early experiments in collective benevolence were largely thanks to a specific group of remarkable but ordinary people— the ‘48ers. Germans, including many who had never been overtly political, but who manned barricades in Berlin and Frankfurt and Munich against various dictatorial monarchs during a torrid spring of hope and agitation, and who were summarily exiled across the Atlantic. People who objectively failed in their first experiment at social change, but who were activated by the effort, so much so that when they landed in a new place they started experimenting anew. Crucially, they didn’t just agitate. They gathered together in beer halls and churches. The Milwaukee Turners (‘48ers through and through) were activists, but they also ran a gym. The Sewer Socialists built a network of gorgeous parks throughout Milwaukee, and made sure they were well utilized. They were far from perfect, but that’s the point. They weren’t heroes. They were objects in motion.

The Twin Cities crowd knew all about this already. Not necessarily the story of the ‘48ers, but the beauty of putting one step in front of the other, together. Last Thursday, being in motion meant listening to me talk and sharing some of the best zucchini bars I’ve had in my life² but in the upcoming weeks, it’ll mean canvassing for an energizing slate of mayoral candidates. I too knew it, because when I woke up on Friday I hightailed it back to my own neighborhood for a thoroughly ridiculous 24 hour bike race that could, I suppose, be derided as an act of wanton frivolity on a dying planet, but which introduced thousands of strangers to one another and garnered hundreds of volunteers for local nonprofits that told their story at bonus checkpoints. Near the end of the race, tired but energized, my kids and I checked in on a small group of neighbors who, inspired by the collective energy, organized a cookout fundraiser for Gaza famine aid. In just a few hours (and in spite of the metric ton of free food being shared elsewhere in the neighborhood), they raised over a thousand dollars and were nearly sold out. We emptied our wallets, and they gave us the last couple cobs of expertly grilled corn. Again, objects in motion.

All I do is write these hopelessly optimistic missives and run my little pep talk trainings and even thanks just to that, I am connected to hundreds of stories across the globe like this (actually thousands, if I’m doing a full accounting). I hear about pickleball leagues that now attend protests together, book clubs that have launched candidates for office, a “sexy, violent, druggy” movie series that also does solidarity fundraising for sex workers and prisoners, retired buddies who can now add “got arrested together,” to their long list of beloved connections.

It doesn’t matter if the first thing you do feels small, or even if it feels disconnected (at first) from the world’s deep pain. Offer people something to do, keep them showing up, and then figure out how to take the second and third step together. Plant a garden with your neighbors. Invite your sporty friends to go on a weekly run together. Ask your doomer-iest text chain to join you for a monthly call where each person has to share an example of somebody doing inspiring work in the world. A few months from now, reflect on your hopefully-still-active-group and ask “ok, what next?”

It won’t be enough, not at first. Depending on how you define “enough,” it won’t ever be so. That’s not the point. The point is that this is actually what it means to be alive together. Making each other feel less alone. Offering each other something to do. Forging hope from the steady fires of collective effort.

You have heard about the trolley problem? There’s a train, barreling down the tracks, about to hit either one person or five people, depending on which way a switch is pulled. As it’s usually told, the tragedy lives in the unstoppable force of the thundering vehicle. But the real tragedy is that there’s only one person attending to the switch. They alone have to embody the roles of hero and villain in the same split second. The opportunity, it seems, comes in the question that’s never asked. “What if that one person lived in community. What if that one person had a neighborhood around them. What if there were 50, or 500, or 5000. Then could we untie our neighbors before it was too late?

There are so many questions that we ask too infrequently.

What if our job wasn’t to save anybody?

What if the greatest gift you could give somebody else was your own sense of powerlessness, or at the very least your honesty about it?

What if, more than anything, we were built to invite more people in, to build together, until the need for anybody’s salvation disappeared in a web of love?

I know it feels like your neighbors don’t care. I know it feels like you're caring isn’t enough. But perhaps you and they aren’t monsters. Perhaps we’re all waiting for a hand, gesturing one step further down the road, recognizing our fear but saying, first in a whisper and then a shout…

C’mon. Step forward anyway.

End notes:

1. I have loved seeing so many people circulating links to donate for basic needs in Gaza right now (I’m personally donating to the Palestinian-led Sameer Project; additionally because I personally believe that opposition to the occupation from within Israel is going to be central to lasting justice for all in the Levant, I’m also currently supporting the joint Jewish-Palestinian Israeli organizing group Standing Together). I also hope that folks are supporting aid efforts in Sudan (I’m supporting UN Crisis Relief). But if I could make a plug consistent with the theme of this essay— whenever you’re considering making an individual donation to an organization that animates you, maybe pause for a second and also ask “is there potential here for a fundraising event/gathering with pals?” Maybe not, at least not every time, but it never hurts to ask! It’s the difference between donating to quiet down your own pangs of sadness and staying in motion.

2. Would you like to learn more about the Riverwest 24 (my neighborhood’s bike race)? Well, while I stand by my statement that I’m not forcing you on Instagram if you aren’t already there, if that is a platform you use you can find a highlight reel explaining the full twenty four hour process on my profile (look for the little circle under my name that says “Riverwest 24”).

3. Far less urgent than other fundraisers, but thank you to all of you who responded to last week’s request to help The White Pages and Barnraisers end July in a sustainable financial place. We made a lot of progress, but haven’t quite hit our goal. If you haven’t contributed and you’d be up for it, thank you, it continues to make a very big difference. It is weird to do a little pass the hat every week here, but it’s also a practice in community. Offering something for free, and trusting that folks will have your back. Also— we’ll have another merch raffle for paid subscribers soon (there may or may not be hats that say POTLUCKS!, and definitely more “Love Harder Than The Fascists Can Hate” shirts), so now would be a great time to join so you’re ready to go as soon as he raffle opens.

4. For the last few years, The White Pages and The Barnraisers Project hasn’t just been me. It’s also been my incredible professional partner Carly Ganz. All good things come to an end, though, and Carly is currently looking for her next work home. Are you hiring and would like an to work with an administrative whiz, empathetic thinker, creative problem-solver and great writer? Hire Carly! Seriously! It was one of the best decisions I made. If you’re curious you can check out her resume as well as this one pager about the kind of position for which she’s searching (remote or Milwaukee area, please) is here. Thank you!

5. Song of the week? Let’s listen to a loud, crunchy guitar anthem about empathy and regret. “Thought You Were Waving” by Militarie Gun.

   The full song of the week playlist is on Apple Music and Spotify.

1. It warrants a full essay for sure, and perhaps an entire book, though it remains to be seen if I’m capable of persuading the publishing industry as to the necessity of the latter.

2. You all, there was a brown butter frosting that was just perfect. I’m pretty sure that the baker responsible reads this newsletter, so Libby, consider this my public testimony as to your skills in excess summer produce utilization.